The Notorious Bettie Page attempts to cover an important chapter in American culture through the story of the famed pinup model. Unfortunately, this pedestrian-paced biopic only skims the surface of Bettie Page's life, leaving us with some historical inaccuracies and many opportunities missed to address a larger picture. Instead, director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol) and writer Guinevere Turner (Go Fish, The L Word) deliver a loving, whimsical story of an innocent woman who eventually realizes there can be a cost for achieving fame and notoriety. Their script only lightly touches on how the century’s greatest pinup queen fit into the changing sexual mores of the 1950’s. This was the decade when the Kinsey Report and Playboy turned the country on its sexually repressed ear.

The film opens and ends with the 1955 Kefauver Senate hearings that tried to link fetish magazines with juvenile delinquency. Page (Gretchen Mol) is stilling in a hallway, waiting to be called as a witness, as she recalls in flashback the events of the previous six years.

She remembers her religious roots in Tennessee, and a brutal gang rape that causes her to leave town and seek her fortune in New York. Eventually she lands a job as a model while taking acting classes. Her magazine photos draw the attention of Irving and Paula Klaw (Chris Bauer and Lili Taylor) a brother-sister team who specialized in in fetish photos and bondage films for a growing underground market of wealthy clients.

Page agrees to star in many of these productions, telling a male friend “it’s just costumes and dressing up” and sees no harm in it. But within a few years, Page’s personal success in the business brings the Klaws to the attention of the authorities. According to the film, the Klaws eventually take “the fifth” in front of Kefauver and then burn all but a handful of their photo library in an act of contrite submission.

Page is advised to leave on a long vacation to Florida, where she meets photographer Bunny Yeager, who brings out the beauty of the model to another series of men’s magazines and nudie postcards. Yeager narrates: “When she is nude she doesn’t seem naked. Maybe it’s just her attitude. Whatever it is, her healthy attitude towards her lovely body is the essence of nudism.” From our point of view, that is the best line in the film. The film is shot in black and white except for certain scenes, such as when Page is in Florida, or when the covers of men’s magazines are shown on the screen. This juxtaposition further highlights the difference between the harsher reality of the world and the bubble in which Bettie Page lived. Most critics saw this part as a career-making performance for the normally blond Gretchen Mol (3:10 to Yuma). Her portrait of the title character is so sweet, so lovable, and so pure of intention, that it's impossible not to like her.

At the end, after hearing a man testify before Kefauver about the death of his son after reading one of her magazines stories, Bettie abandons her career, returns to Tennessee, and becomes a lay preacher. Years later, when a man recognizes her after a service, she tells him she was not ashamed of her photos. “Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden of Eden,” she reminds the man. “When they sinned, they put on clothes.”